Pirate Bay tried buying island to make their own country

The Pirate Bay (commonly abbreviated TPB) is a website that provides torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. It was founded in Sweden in 2003.
In 2009, the website’s founders were put on trial in Sweden, charged with facilitating illegal downloading of copyrighted material. They were found guilty by the court and sentenced to a year in prison with a fine of 30 million SEK (€2.7M or US$3.5M as of 2009). In some countries, ISPs have been ordered to block access to the website. Since then, proxies have been made all around the world providing access to The Pirate Bay.

In January 2007, when the micronation of Sealand was put up for “sale”, the ACFI and The Pirate Bay tried to buy it. The Sealand government however did not want to be involved with The Pirate Bay, as it was their opinion that file sharing represented “theft of proprietary rights”. A new plan was formed to buy an island instead, but this too was never implemented, despite the website having raised US$25,000 (€15,000) in donations for this cause.

The P2P news blog, TorrentFreak, reported on 12 October 2007 that the Internet domain ifpi.com, which previously belonged to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, an anti-piracy organisation, had been acquired by The Pirate Bay. When asked about how they got hold of the domain, Sunde told TorrentFreak, “It’s not a hack, someone just gave us the domain name. We have no idea how they got it, but it’s ours and we’re keeping it.” The website was renamed “The International Federation of Pirates Interests.” However, the IFPI filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organisation shortly thereafter, which subsequently ordered The Pirate Bay to return the domain name to the IFPI.